


God's Gonna Cut You Down

by sunshinestealer



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-03-28 20:05:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3868096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshinestealer/pseuds/sunshinestealer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>sober!Gamzee muses on the sins of his fellow trolls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_You can run on for a long time,  
_ _Run on for a long time…  
Run on for a long time..._

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and you’re currently watching your best friend through the ventilation system. Your movements are like that of a slug as you half-heartedly combat crawl towards the next vent you can peer through. You’ve always moved lazily and spoken to your friends in a monotone, always in a fugue state due to that rotten shit you ate for sweeps to quiet down your pan when the nights and days got just _too loud._ What can you say? Old habits die hard. 

Speaking of habits, Karkat likes to pace when he’s agitated. At the same time, he talks at what is a ‘quiet’ volume for him. Just barely a shout. You’ve heard your brother in this state before, freaking out over something you can’t even remember any more. But when Karkat gets himself worked up, he really _does_ get himself worked up.

It was fun to taunt him through Pesterchum, with your little felt puppet pal by your side. You could feel his fear in every word he typed, and it made your chucklevoodoos sing. But, you don’t hate him. Hell, you couldn’t find it in you to dislike Karkat. You’re just doing a fun little prank, really. And Karkat needs to be kept on his toes.

Karkat’s freaking out right now over all your dead friends. All the people he could have protected (not likely) if he had only not turned his back on the bodies. Or been there for everyone as a good leader in the first place. Your Lord threw his vengeance upon the meteor like a vengeful heathen god of the ancient people hurled lightning bolts. Tensions reached breaking point. You once heard an expression: “Hell is other people.” Certainly was the case on the meteor. Trolls who couldn’t tolerate each other’s presence were suddenly forced into close quarters, and from there on in, it was just a matter of waiting for this pot to boil over on the stove.

Certainly didn’t help that Karkat was insistent on being the leader of this ragtag group of trolls who were probably a sweep away from culling. Sure, some were protected by their highblood status (or even their giant, terrifying lusus), but in all honestly, the drones or the military training officials would’ve looked for any reason to kill you all off if given the chance. Eridan would have run his mouth in the Imperial Navy and gotten keelhauled to set an example. You chuckle at the mental image of that.

Life on Alternia has made you all more than a bit dysfunctional. Even in a universe that wasn’t ruled by an Empress as violent and capricious as yours, you imagine all those lower than you and the seadwellers would have been culled for the good of the species. There are those with such a huge abundance of psychic power that they’d likely burn themselves out before adulthood, sloppy wrecks of trolls just begging to be skewered by a culling fork. Others have lived in a self-imposed isolation, rarely seeing other trolls and skipping out on their education.

If you’re the only twelve trolls left of the entire species, then you need to foster the next generation to be a whole _lot_ better. If the Prince hadn’t blown up the Matriorb, you consider you would have been a good caretaker to all these pathetic grubs, who would probably need to be fed by hand and kept in incubators in lieu of actually having a cave system to live in before emerging with four limbs instead of six.

Back to Karkat. He’s clawing at his scalp, taking all of this shit way too personally. Brother’s got a failure complex an astronomical unit wide. His shoulders are shaking with raw sobs, and if you were close enough, you’d probably be able to see cherry red-tinted tears.

He paces down the corridor again, telling himself off for crying and occasionally clenching and unclenching his fist.

You continue to watch him. Maybe to rile him further, you’ll slap the bottom of the ventilation shaft hard, startling him with the sudden noise from above. Instead, you quietly continue to crawl, watching over him further. You mapped out the schematics of this meteor laboratory long ago. You’re leading him towards the laboratory. Ain’t nowhere else this corridor leads down.

And yet, you’re still deciding what to do with him. You can’t kill Karkat. He’s your best brother in the whole world. It’s a conflict that’s doing nothing but getting louder and angrier, half of you screaming _KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM_ and the other half telling you to just _mess around with him until he’s begging you for death_. And in between — shit, doesn’t the pan have two halves with a little junction between them? — is you, wondering if it’s rational to kill your best friend and leave yourself alone to wreak the Lord’s havoc across the rest of paradox space.

You try to rationalise it to yourself by suggesting that Karkat has sinned and needs to repent in some way. How he’s going to do that, you’re not sure. But his sins are enough to be judged by the Alternian courts, handled by the Subjugglators and Laughsassins rather than the teal bloods. 

Has he been a shitty leader? No, not really. He’s been shouting at trolls who scoff at the very idea of being told what to do, especially by somebody who isn’t even on the hemospectrum and clearly lacking in physical power. You’re tall and wiry, your strength hidden until your enemies _really_ think to piss you off. Karkat is short and only has his shrieking temper tantrums going for him. Oh, and he’s good with a sickle. But he’s kidding himself if he thinks he could get into the Threshecutioners. Perhaps that’s how he dealt with not being good enough, or the inevitability of probably being hemotyped before conscription and swiftly culled — by insisting to himself that he would one day be as cool as Troll Will Smith, getting into fights and then forced into an imperial military corps that was remarkably blasé towards his sassy quips, the live studio audience chortling like his mishaps were the funniest shit they had ever heard in their lifetime.

Tut, tut. The Alternian Moral Code said somewhere — not that you’ve ever read that gigantic tome — that mutantbloods have a responsibility to turn themselves in, or off themselves and spare the culling drone any trouble. That’s sin enough for the LOUD GUY. You ought to give the two halves of your pans nicknames. Karkat is LOUD GUY, and… shit, who do you know who’s really quiet? Equius, as despicable as you find him, speaks in that creepily quiet tone. But you’re not going to disservice quiet guy like that. You decide to leave their names as LOUD GUY and quiet guy. You’re not going to admit that you could call them UNSTABLE GAMZEE and less stable gamzee. 

You smack the bottom of the ventilation shaft and honk a horn loud enough for your brother to think you’re right behind him, laughing to yourself as Karkat freaks out, sinking to his knees and shaking as he whips his head back and forth.

Hilarious. He won’t hate you for this, right?

Just gotta let him know you’re still on his tail.

And that he shouldn’t be turning his back on the bodies. Or to anything, really. 

heh heh.


	2. Chapter 2

_Go tell that long tongued liar_  
_Go and tell that midnight rider_  
_Tell the rambler,_  
_The gambler,_  
_The back-biter,_  
_Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down.  
_ _Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down._

You’ve decided to lay off Karkat for a while now. So, you’ve got your back against the wall of the vent and are just swaying and rocking, lost in your thoughts.

And for some reason, your thoughts turn to Vriska.

Oh, that Serket bitch. Constantly messing with your buddy Tavros, bullying him and… shit, was she pitch-flirting? She’d always slither her way into Tavros’ life, claiming she was going to make him a ‘better’ troll.

Shit, you couldn’t even imagine Tavros with a hateful bone in his body. He’s young, sure, but naïve to a degree that strikes a chord with your pity harder than you’ve ever felt it. It produces the opposite effect in Vriska, clearly.

When you see her on the meteor, you say to her face that you’re scared of her and don’t want to really speak with her. Poor impulse control and lacking social skills on your part. She’s fierce, and she’s beautiful, in a way that scares you. You guess this is the way female spiders look towards the male before devouring them on those nature programmes you watch on TV when you’re stoned and need some background noise while relaxing on your horn pile.

Vriska’s possibly the most perfect troll on the whole team of twelve, using the Alternian definition of perfection. An ambitious noble troll who relished in her violent tendencies, helped feed her lusus, and deeply respected her ancestor. She was probably the least likely to be culled on or before conscription day, too.

Perhaps her bloodlust was what held up a black mirror to you, back when you were a useless piece of shit who’d sneak around the meteor rooms, snagging slime out of your fellow trolls’ recuperacoons. Until everybody ran out.

Since everyone tended to congregate in the main computer lab, and you were very meticulous with your raids of everybody’s respiteblocks, nobody even noticed, really. The supply of the weak excuse for sopor that people could manage to alchemise thinned morning by morning, until Karkat eventually called a meeting about it. His decree was that with no more sopor slime, there was no choice but for trolls to make like mammals and gather up comfortable objects to sleep on. No problem — you still had a surplus of horns, and Kanaya has made more than enough fabric to donate scraps of blankets and throws for everybody. Well, with the obvious exception of Aradia, who now has no need for sleep. Day terrors be damned, this was the only way you were going to be able to sleep in the foreseeable future.

You recall back to when you snuck around Vriska’s room on the meteor. There were spare laboratories on this hunk of rock floating out on the furthest ring, and wouldn’t you know, there were exactly twelve of them. Twelve private dormitories and a common room, like this was one of those fancy highblooded boarding schools for nobles who had lost their lusus one way or another and needed the state to nanny them.

Vriska’s room was decorated sparsely, like most of the rooms on the meteor are. There’s no point wasting any more grist on useless alchemised tchotchkes, like crappy wizard statues or plush toys. Not your Unireal Air, though. That shit is  _awesome_.

But that’s the issue with having an item like the alchemiter. You can create just about anything, and eventually run out of ideas. Now it’s used for necessities, and the machine is locked away in a room where only Karkat knows the access code, so no idiot bumbles in their and makes a giant statue of Troll Will Smith out of spite or whatever.

To go with her awful posters of that gormless-looking human actor, Vriska’s drawn a few posters of spiders, and there’s even a shitty picture of Mindfang, her roleplay persona. Supposedly named after her ancestor, too. You wonder how the notorious pirate queen would feel about that — knowing her name is being used in a childish game of play and pretend.

Like all the rooms in the meteor, the walls are painted a dark grey, with shiny black floor tiles complementing them. Vriska has strewn DVDs of Nicolas Cage’s movies across the floor. You vaguely recall one that had a troll equivalent:  _Spiritual Being With The Duty To Lead The Dead To Their Final Resting Place Falls For A Troll Female Doctorturer and Makes The Decision To Become A Physical Being In Order To Win Her Matespriteship And Also Fend Off The Romantic Rivalry Of A Highblood Male_.  _However, Tragedy Occurs When The Troll Female Arises Early and Absconds To A Verdant Forested Getaway and Uses A Two-Wheeled Device on a Logging Road to Buy A Bottle of Hoofbeast Milk. Includes Several Deaths, Zero Explosions, Quadrant Vacillation, and Scenes Guaranteed To Make One’s Tear Ducts Shamefully Leak._

Shit had subtitles and bored you, but Karkat positively loved it. This film looks even more boring, and has a vague as fuck title — does this broad visit an actual metropolitan area inhabited by angels? Maybe it’s like the Land of Wrath and Angels, Eridan’s so-called ‘terrible experience’ that he will whine about to anybody who’ll still listen to him.

Ugh, there were even traces of her lipstick left all over these posters. Let it be known — Vriska has a crush on a weird-looking primate from another universe.

The thought disgusts you, and LOUD GUY suddenly gets… well, very LOUD. Cacophonous, even. You calm him down by dipping your finger in Vriska’s sopor slime and licking it. The LOUD GUY slithers back into the recesses of your mind almost instantly, and you briefly forget what you even came in here for.

Damn. You hear footsteps down the hallway leading to this place and decide to abscond. You’ll raid whoever’s respite block is closest.

You manage to get into the ventilation just as Vriska’s door slams open. You may have been unsuccessful in your raid tonight, but there’s still time to watch her for a bit. She presses a kiss to two of her fingers, and dabs it against one of the posters. It’s sickening, really.

There’s a mirror installed in every room, for vanity’s sake. You all vowed to at least try to stay out of your rooms and make yourselves decent for the night ahead when you meet in the computer room. Your mirror is pretty useful for applying your face paint — though there aren’t any candles, beads or clown icons around to make it holy, like it was back at your hive. The mirror is too big to even prop up on a makeshift shrine, so you’ve had to make do with that plain shit for a while now.

Speaking of shrines, Vriska gathers up the scattered DVDs and neatly stacks them on a side table, right underneath the watchful gaze of that weird human actor’s poster for  _Bangkok Dangerous_. (The hell does that title even  _mean?_ ) Then she sets to alphabetise them. Shit, you should alchemise your sis some incense and prayer beads so she can create some new religion around this human motherfucker.

That’d suit Vriska, actually — being the overlord of some newfound faith, sitting atop her throne as the prophet supreme while her loyal subjects attend to her. You darkly chuckle under your breath at that mental image, hoping she didn’t hear you.

* * *

Back in the present, you’re still thinking about the spider girl. How she smiles with all her fangs on display as an open threat, how her shrieking laugh can be heard throughout the meteor, and how she deliberately headed into danger just so she could have the glory of being the slayer of the Black King. It even overshadows the fact that you dealt the final boss the most damage out of anybody in your group.

You don’t have any black feelings towards her whatsoever, but you do dislike her, and you’re still a little frightened of her. She’s an intense presence, and will ramble on  _forever_ if you allow her to. A classic sociopath, she’ll try to be nice and discover all your hurtful shames and secrets, just so she can twist the knife later. Tavros mistakenly told her about his imaginary friend Rufio, and Vriska now openly taunts him about his lack of self-esteem.

You keep your own personal shit as far away from Vriska as you possibly can.

Well, away from everybody, really.

You see, your faith has a bit of an image problem. Trolls from more common lawn-dwellings assume you’re either stupid enough to be taken in by what they view as sheer fiction. That, or you’re a member of some violent religious gang that kidnaps young dark blue to purple-blooded trolls for the purposes of indoctrination. Well… shit, the latter  _is_ how a lot of it happens, but in your case, you just got sent to a faith school. Then you just started attending The Gathering, and liked the sense of euphoria you got so much (from faith and… other substances) that you just kept going every year.

But enough about religion, especially since you saw that goddamn video. Thinking about it just puts LOUD GUY on edge, and quiet guy isn’t too thrilled with the prospect either.

You crawl along the bottom of the shaft and decide to mess with Vriska for a little while. She’s going to take a little bit more time to rile up, though. You could get your punchline-blooded brother upset by merely making loud noises, chuckling and honking as you went. Vriska doesn’t scare easily at all. And that’s half the fun of it.

Having that  _thing_ for a lusus probably got rid of any fears Vriska might have developed had she been chosen by a less murderous animal. There are giant wild scorpions that occasionally become lusii, and don’t require a constant diet of young trolls. But that wouldn’t suit Vriska, zodiac symbolism aside. She learned from a young age how to draw people into her parlour, to bring people over for ‘dinner’, only to reveal that she had no intention of laying the table in her own nutrition block.

Of course, Vriska loved to toy with her food, having grown bored of more simple methods. You’d seen in her nightmares, some her deeper regrets and decisions that still haunted her, even though she would insist that they didn’t bother her any more. The dawning realisation that she would have to feed her lusus, or else be eaten herself. Desperately throwing shop-bought meat down into the canyon in the hopes of not having to bloody her hands, before she finally swallowed down her fears and captured a troll passing by her hive.

Vriska didn’t fear being eaten any more, though. Her lusus was simply far too big to even try to get to her charge, and her diet required more than just one troll to eat per week. Plus, with this symbiosis of lusus and troll, if Vriska were killed, Charlotte would likely die, too large and fat to be an effective predator any more.

Charlotte. Who the fuck would even name their lusus something so preposterous, that sounded like it came out of a children’s book? Far easier to just say lusus-mom or lusus-dad.

Vriska has a cocky little step in her gait, and she’s wearing her gaudy orange god-tier robes. It’s her pathetic way of asserting her superiority over everybody else.

Maybe the other trolls would respect you if you had ascended, despite being stoned out of your goddamn mind and mumbling about Faygo and your predilection for laying back on your horn pile. Staring at the ceiling, crossing your eyes and watching all those motherfucking miraculous squiggles go back and forth across your vision was better than any TV or movie. Well, even the ancient gods eventually had enough of being lazy, hedonistic pieces of shit and eventually threw down their wrath.

You remember the tale of that ancient serpent wrapped around Alternia, right on the inside. Choking it from within until the planet was eventually ready for its next stage of life as the grand setting for the Dark Carnival. Not official church doctrine, just something borrowed from a former popular tradition to get heretics to see the light. Gods who hated the shit out of each other, creating titans, stealing mortal grubs specially to raise them to fill out some murderous prophecy. Those old stories were dope as  _fuck._

You’re an instrument of your gods. That much is certain. No, scratch that — you  _are_ those gods, working in tandem to bring forth the big guy when his time comes. (Well, not that it matters, when he’s already here anyway.) LOUD GUY comes out, crowing  his praises in agreement, and quiet guy says ‘amen’ in response, which results in you stifling to keep your own mouth from vocalising another epithet of hallelujah.

Vriska’s not going to go down easily, though. You’re going to have to slip right into her head for any of this to work — and she’s sneaky, she knows how mind control works. But, from what you can tell of your eleven co-players, none of them had any idea you’d have any psychic powers. It certainly skipped a generation for Equius, who puts his brain to work by memorising boring as fuck robotics manuals.

Eridan memorises magic bullshit, almost  _asking_ to piss off the Messiahs every time he casts one of those fake spells. Taking from the ether without giving or sacrificing, the arrogant royal shitstain. Sure was nice of Kan-sis to make him that wand, to keep him occupied.

But that’s one place  _below_ you on the spectrum, and one place above you. Not all seadwellers and highbloods get these psychic powers, but there are a fair majority who do. Your powers were a bit of a late bloomer, really — you didn’t discover anything really interesting you could do with them until your big old epiphany. You practice in that little room you found after squirrelling your way through the ventilation system.

Your mind can get  _dark_. You discover your ability to craft daymares and nightmares by simply inserting horrific figures extracted from the subconscious minds of those around you. They hardly notice their subconscious is being rifled through, like you’re a hive burglar and they’re just holed away upstairs with their lusus, unaware that they forgot to lock their front door.

Shit, if you were clever enough, you could be a psychotherapist. Some highblood with no real issues in their lives sitting on your couch and talking about their mental upsets for four hundred and twenty boondollars an hour. Not that you’d need to be told — lusus issues, deep-seated phobias and negative behaviour patterns carried on from wigglerhood would all be plain as day to you with a quick touch to their pan with your chucklevoodoo.

You mime throwing some stardust in your face, promising to say a few ‘Hails’ later in contrition for not using the sacred stuff. And then you get to work.

The shadows warp around Vriska, and she quickly notices. Bitch is hella smart, though — moving to a lighter side of the hallway and then skipping down the stairwell towards the common room. She doesn’t seem to have any suspicion in her pan about you being around. She’s somewhat spooked, sure, but as spooked as anybody who saw something out of the corner of their peeper that they swore was never there before.

Maybe you should give her a fair warning about stairs.

Chucklevoodoo is like a careful balancing act. When you’re messing around with daymares, it’s like doing fancy appliqué onto a finely-woven tapestry. When you’re going for a little bit of mental manipulation and striking fear into trolls, it’s like pulling the strings of a puppet. Like your good friend Cal probably had once upon a time. But, it’s hard work to do both at the same time. You bet your ancestor could torture heretics into giving up everything, like that bad guy in Troll Batman.

You softy enter Vriska’s mind, hovering just above her in the shaft — and you’re in. All it takes it one little pull of the strings to simply make a leg flop out of place… and  _there she goes_.

Fucking hilarious how she tumbles, really. Vriska somewhat keeps her balance, but her arms flail, and she slams up against the wall of the landing with her forearm.

After taking a moment to compose herself, she looks around, as if questioning if anybody saw that shit. You sure did. Grade A hilarity.

However, Vriska’s not the kind of person who’s scared of being laughed at. She’s the bully, not the hapless, panicky victim. She’s not deeply insecure about her behaviour — in fact, Vriska views every little negative aspect of herself as a positive, spinning it in some ridiculous manner to feed into her almost bursting sense of pride. The look is curious, and becomes triumphant as she grins to herself.

Her head is turned up, right towards the vent you’ve been staring through this whole time.

“I knew clowns were goddamn stupid, Gamzee, but could you have made that  _any more obvious?”_ She doesn’t seem to care that she’s only a small flight of stairs away from the common room, and that any of the trolls could hear her if they quirked their ears a little. “A nasty sense of foreboding, the shadows seeming to move, making my leg turn to jelly just so you could  _warn me about the stairs?_ ” She’s deeply unimpressed, fluffing out her hair in that annoying tic she does when she’s feeling particularly proud of herself. “So I’d go tumbling down, down, down, down like dear, sweet little Tavros?”

You don’t dignify her with a reply. That last barb stung.

“I know you’re there, you idiot. And, Gamzee, consider this fair warning — I am not scared of you, and I knew this wannabe subjugglator slash chucklevoodoo shit was coming for a while now. Why? Because I am in possession of ALL the answers.”

“Vriska, who are you speaking to?” A voice calls up. Soft. Poshly accented, with every syllable correctly enunciated. Your lovely jadeblooded sister.

Not ashamed by the idea of being caught talking out loud to herself, Vriska continues her one-sided conversation with you. “You ever do that again, I will make you wish you were never  _hatched_.”

Sounds like a pitch flirtation to you.

That, or Vriska insisting to herself that she’s not just pathetically overconfident in her abilities. You want the strings you’re pulling made obvious, and Vriska was the perfect one to practice on. She turns on her red-booted heel and absconds towards the common room, telling Kanaya to mind her own beeswax. You don’t hear the rest, but you assume there’s going to be some mention of the jade troll’s irksome meddling.

That or they’re going to tell Karkat that his moirail is  _again_ out of control, like some barkbeast that only listens to one handler. That’s when you’re going to roll over, proving to Karkat that you’re just some dumbass with no two pan cells to rub together, who didn’t mean to hurt anybody: you tried to take away his food, or pulled his tail, or triggered him into attack mode. Poor little guy can’t help his bad self.

LOUD GUY cackles and hollers at that suggestion, with quiet guy bringing up the rear in agreement. In fact, it might just be time to slip out of the vents and seek out Karkat again.

Or rile him up further.

One of the two.


End file.
